


To Those Who Wait

by Unforgotten



Category: X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom
Genre: Canon Disabled Character, Domestic, Future Fic, Grandparents & Grandchildren, M/M, Post-Canon, Reconciliation, Retirement
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-01
Updated: 2015-06-01
Packaged: 2018-04-02 08:37:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4053625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unforgotten/pseuds/Unforgotten
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the late 1990s, Erik falls off the radar. When he finally bothers to get back in touch, Charles is astonished to learn he's been living in the suburbs with a dog, a cat, and a granddaughter who visits on weekends.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Those Who Wait

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to cygnaut for all the support and encouragement! I wouldn't have finished this without you. <3

Charles made a circuit of the park, followed by another. He didn't see Erik anywhere. Not a sign of him, either time. 

Erik generally wasn't difficult to find when they arranged these meetings. They always made sure to meet in a park that had chess tables, which this one did—but although Erik had always showed up first, procured them a table and guarded it against all comers before Charles' own arrival, today there was no one sitting alone at any of the tables, and none of the old men playing against a partner were he.

Charles set about a third lap of the park, this time paying more attention, looking from side to side as he went. Perhaps Erik was late, but it was also possible he was hiding. Where's Erik? If this was a game, Charles cared for it a great deal less than he did Where's Waldo?, which tended to be a slight obsession among the younger students at the school and which also tended to give him a headache. He was going to end up with a headache today, too. He could feel it.

Perhaps Erik was trying to make Charles look for him—really _look_ , with his telepathy. Over the past thirty years, Erik had often muttered, sulked and made dark asides about Charles' unwillingness to interact with his mind unless absolutely necessary. Most of the times Charles had, it had been because his person was being crushed by some object which Erik had dropped on him, thrown at him, or otherwise caused to be there. Metal tentacles had been involved on one occasion. After the fifth time, Charles had begun to suspect that Erik was doing it on purpose, but of course there was no way to confirm this without giving in. Charles refused to look, and Erik flatly denied it when Charles had accused him after the seventh or so time, which had also been the third time Erik had decided to grace Charles' hospital room with his presence after the event. Charles would really have preferred he send flowers and a card, because who wanted to see the person who'd just almost killed him for the nth time, but Erik hadn't asked for his opinion and dismissed it when Charles expressed it anyway.

This was childish. Charles' fourth circuit of the park would be his last, he decided. He wasn't going to give in on this one, even if Erik had been flying so far under the radar for the last few years that Charles had been halfway convinced he had gone off and died. Yes, he was curious about what Erik had been doing, but generally speaking, the worse it was, the louder Erik was about it, and the more Charles would have heard months or years ago. No news was good news when it came to what Erik was up to. So this meeting wasn't necessary just because Erik had finally seen fit to call him. Charles didn't have to be here. He could get fed up. He could leave.

On Charles' sixth circuit of the park, he spotted a white-haired man on a park bench by the children's playground. He was wearing a long-sleeved flannel shirt and a red ballcap, and sat facing away from the sidewalk. The back of his head resembled the back of Erik's head rather strongly. He had an arm slung over the back of the bench, fingers tapping out an impatient rhythm against the wood. When Charles parked beside him, he said, "It took you long enough."

"Yes, well. I wasn't expecting a lumberjack," Charles said, taking Erik's measure. He had grown a beard. It was hideous, of course. Even the slightest amount of facial hair had always made Erik appear deranged, an effect which had only increased with age.

"What were you expecting?" 

"I'm not quite sure." Charles followed Erik's gaze, which was fixed on the playground, where a handful of children were chasing one another around, complete with the usual happy shrieking and shouting of young people at play. "I hope you aren't planning on kidnapping anyone."

He found himself scrutinizing the children, looking for any sign of a mutation. One boy had a tail, but as wonderful as that was, it couldn't possibly be that useful to the Master of Magnetism (even if it did appear to be prehensile, judging by his deft maneuvering on the jungle gym). Charles found himself wondering what the schools were like down here, if he ought to find out where that boy lived and have a word with his parents in case they were looking for something better—but wait, Erik was saying something.

"Excuse me, what was that?" Charles asked, not because he hadn't heard, but because it sometimes took a moment for incredible-sounding statements to parse. (This happened more often these days than it had in the past, but although his doctor had suggested he have his hearing tested, Charles was still dragging his feet on making an appointment. He spent enough time being poked and prodded as it was. Anyway, the idea that he might need a hearing aid was absurd. Old men wore hearing aids.)

"I'm here with my granddaughter," Erik said again, which was what Charles thought he'd said.

" _Really_." Charles hadn't been aware that Erik had any granddaughters—and no grandchildren anywhere near this age. Wanda's boys must have been in their twenties by now. "And which one is she?" But, looking out on the playground with a new eye, he noticed one little girl pontificating at the other children from the top of the slide, and thought he knew. The cape and what appeared to be a crown on her head were a dead giveaway, as well. "Did you choose that get-up, or did she?"

Far from looking offended at Charles' opinion of his fashion sense, Erik said, "No one can make Luna wear anything she doesn't want to." He smiled as he said it, a soft, fond expression Charles had never before seen on his face (though granted, soft, fond expressions weren't that likely to come up in most of the situations in which they'd encountered each other in over the last forty years).

"Luna, hmm?" Charles said vaguely, more an attempt to sound thoughtful than anything else. He didn't know what else to say. This wasn't at all the situation he'd expected. Whenever he and Erik had met up before, perhaps once a year or so, there'd always been other things to speak of, or more accurately argue over—politics, mostly, or the game of chess between them. Very rarely anything personal.

"She's Pietro's," Erik said, answering the question it hadn't yet occurred to Charles to ask. "She's visiting me this weekend."

"I see." Charles knew plenty of people who had children and grandchildren. He had plenty of experience in discussing people's descendants with them. Somehow, that didn't stop him from feeling incredibly awkward now that it was Erik. "How old is she?"

This was another thing he thought he knew, the math done several seconds in advance of Erik saying, "She turned five in February."

For most of the past thirty years, Erik had made unnecessarily dramatic speeches on live television, gone out of his way to destroy the occasional national monument, or otherwise made himself a nuisance. A little over five years ago, that had all stopped, and no one had heard from him since. At least, Charles hadn't, nor anyone he'd chanced to discuss Erik's disappearance with. It had been a bit of a mystery in the press for several years—where had Magneto gone, and why, and where would he turn up next.

No one, so far as Charles knew, had ever put forth the middle of nowhere, Iowa as a possibility. But here Erik was, nonetheless.

"Ah," Charles said, off-kilter in a way he had not expected to be during this visit. "Look, I'm happy for you, but is there any particular reason you asked me to come here?"

Erik had given no explanation over the phone. The location, date, and time, all brusquely conveyed into Charles' voicemail. Charles had tried to call him back, but Erik hadn't picked up the phone. It was typical of him to decide they'd do things on his terms or not at all.

Erik didn't answer now, either, but instead rose to his feet and called, "Luna! It's time to go!"

"Go where?" Charles asked.

At the same moment, Luna called back, "I'm coming! Watch this, Poppa!" She went backwards down the slide, hit the ground hard enough that Charles let out a sympathetic oof, then dashed across the playground and came to a halt in front of the bench. "Did you see me?"

"Yes, and you were fine," Erik said. He glanced at Charles, then back at Luna. "Luna, this is Charles. He's an old friend of mine."

"Hi," Luna said, suddenly a little less certain, the way young children so often seemed to be upon meeting him. (Either that, or full of questions about the chair, depending on how outgoing they were and how many "don't bother/be rude to people in wheelchairs" lectures they'd been exposed to so far in their lives.)

"Hello, Luna. I'm very pleased to meet you," Charles said smoothly, though he was irritated as ever by Erik's presumption. They most certainly were not friends. He had made himself clear on any number of occasions, over games of chess, by Erik's bedside any of the number of times Erik had shown up at his house bleeding or with something or many things broken, and across the battlefield. He'd objected to that term any number of times in any number of ways, yet still Erik persisted. 'Old friend,' ha! Erik was the one who needed to get his hearing checked. Just because Charles was glad he wasn't dead didn't make them _friends_.

****

Apparently, they were going to see a movie. Charles followed Erik and Luna down the sidewalk, still more than a bit flummoxed. He'd never witnessed anything as unlikely as the Master of Magnetism walking hand in hand with a little girl wearing a cape and plastic crown. His eyes didn't want to believe it, but no matter how often he blinked or shook his head, the image remained.

At the movie theater, Erik paid for their tickets—two seniors and one child, Christ—and he and Luna went to get snacks while Charles found them a place to sit. Not that there were a lot of options, but Luna certainly seemed charmed, saying, "We get to sit near the FRONT?" when she and Erik found him.

"I used to prefer sitting in the very back row, myself," Charles said before he could check himself. "Or better yet, going to the drive-in."

Luna didn't get this, but Erik did, giving him a sharp look.

"Sorry." Charles wasn't certain whether he was apologizing for making suggestive remarks in front of Erik's granddaughter, or for not so subtly reminding Erik that he'd slept with other people. (It was definitely the first one. If Erik hadn't wanted to know that Charles had slept with other people at the drive-in, well, he should have let Charles take him to one back in 1962, and then he could have assumed Charles meant him.)

It had been quite some time since Charles had been to a movie. Some telepaths actively disliked television since they couldn't feel the characters' thoughts, but on Charles' part it had always been less dislike than disinterest. There hadn't seemed to be a point in going to movies if he couldn't be multi-tasking in the back row or the backseat of his car. 

Now, as _Finding Nemo_ , the computer-animated feature they'd come to see, progressed, he found that he had very little interest in the adventures and emotional lives of fish. For one thing, he'd never heard a fish having a thought, which made suspending his disbelief rather more difficult than usual in this instance. So instead, Charles took the next hour and a half or so to sneak glances at Erik and his granddaughter, trying to process all of this. But he only found himself more bemused when, every five minutes, Luna would exclaim or start talking to Erik, who would listen patiently; yet, whenever Erik said something to her, she said "SHHHHHHHHHHHHH," and Erik clammed up. Charles had never seen anyone manage to shush Erik without help along the lines of a blow to the head or a gag, but here a five year old girl had him wrapped around her pinky finger. It was utterly bizarre.

****

It didn't cease being bizarre after the credits. In fact, it only became more so, as Charles then followed Erik and Luna home. 'Home' turned out to be a small blue house in a neighborhood full of similar but for the most part less blue houses. There was a red Buick LeSabre in the driveway and a swing set visible in the fenced back yard. The front lawn was newly mowed, the rose bushes in front of the windows neatly trimmed. It was all about five thousand times more domestic than Charles would ever have believed if he weren't seeing it for himself. 

He wasn't sure whether or not to be surprised about the ramp at the front of the house. On the one hand, it seemed like common courtesy to him—but on the other hand he'd had plenty of people invite him over to their house only to act completely surprised that no, in fact, he was not going to be able to get up the steep front steps.

Something smelled very good in that house. Charles' suspension of disbelief remained in more or less working order until he followed Erik into the kitchen and discovered the source of the smell.

"You do not have a crock pot," Charles said flatly.

Erik gave him an impatient look, as if Charles were the one who was out his mind here. "Why wouldn't I?"

"I don't even know where to start." For one thing, Erik was a food snob. He'd eat anything you put in front of him while he was covalescing at your house, but if he so much as suspected it came out of a can, well, he'd make snide remarks about it for the rest of the day. He'd never seemed to understand that, while wanted terrorists who spent three to six months at a time hiding in safe houses had plenty of time to cook everything from scratch, headmasters who were running sixteen hours a day to try to save the world had to rely on Campbells when their cook had gone home for the day. "What are you crock potting?"

At this, Erik had the grace to look embarrassed, and his voice was gruff when he said, "Macaroni and cheese. Luna won't eat anything else."

Macaroni and cheese. _Macaroni and cheese._ Unbelievable. So much so, in fact, that it took Charles longer than it should have to note how much metal there was in this kitchen—it could have been a scene out of _Jurassic Park_ , which was another movie with a large number of animals in it. Charles hadn't cared much for that one, either, but when he saw it had caught himself thinking that it would have been very helpful to have Magneto along at the kitchen scene in particular. Now, he caught himself thinking that if he looked away from the counter, there might be a Velociraptor tap-tapping on top of it when he looked back. That was how close the resemblance was. The only difference, really, was that Erik's kitchen had multi-level countertops and about twenty crayon drawings on the fridge.

"We'll be eating in about half an hour," Erik said. "If you want something else, say so now."

"—Macaroni and cheese is fine."

" _No_ ," Erik said firmly, which was confusing until he added, "Leave him alone."

This was when Charles realized that he wasn't the intended recipient of that negative, and looked down to find that there was a dog sniffing his shoes. It was a dachshund, a little red one. Its response to Erik's command was to start sniffing the hem of Charles' pantleg instead. 

It was too bad Charles had already used up his breaking point. If he'd known this was coming, he wouldn't have batted an eye over Erik's crock pot. "I can't believe you have a dog," he said.

"Not a very good one," Erik said, frowning. "Tabitha, go lay down."

Tabitha (evidently) neither went anywhere nor lay down. She (or so Charles assumed) continued sniffing Charles' pantleg for a moment, then glanced at Erik, as if for the first time noticing that her person (if that was how she thought of him; Charles had never been able to make much sense out of any dog's thoughts—although dogs, at least, seemed to have something going on in those minds of theirs) was irritated with her. Then she sat down.

"Close enough," Erik said with no little irony, along with a sidelong glance at Charles.

"I see your management style hasn't changed," Charles said, by which he meant it hadn't improved, except perhaps in that Erik didn't seem on the verge of having an aneurysm about this insubordination. There had always been a lot of insubordination; Erik had always been uniquely dreadful at leading his Brotherhood. (He'd also been uniquely good at recruiting for it; while the faces the X-Men had gone up again had undergone a full turnover every six months or so, there had always been, well, plenty of faces. He wondered if Erik went through dogs at the same rate he'd gone through recruits.)

Erik sniffed and turned to peer at the contents of his crock pot again, and that was when something jumped down to the counter from on top of the fridge. It was not a velociraptor; rather, it was something much smaller and covered in fur, which immediately marched up to the edge of the counter and mewed loudly.

"You have a cat, too?" Charles asked. "Well, why not."

Luna appeared at one of the entrances to the kitchen and said, "Poppa, can I watch _The Lion King_?"

"Have I ever stopped you?" Erik asked. "Yes, but try to keep the volume down."

"Okay!" Luna ran off, the cape she was still wearing fluttering behind her.

In the meantime, Erik's cat had wound up in Charles' lap. Cats always did, for some reason. All the cats they'd ever kept at the school had always liked him until he ran over their tail by accident, at which point he became the enemy.

"What's your cat's name?" Charles asked, not because he cared so much as because he was expecting something along the lines of Dolores, to go along with Tabitha.

"She doesn't have a name."

Unfortunately for Erik, Charles had already discovered the tag on her collar, which included her name along with Erik's address and phone number. "You named your cat Sweetpea? Really?"

"Luna named her," Erik said rather stiffly, as some very loud music emerged from the den. "It was between that and Baby, in the end."

"I see," Charles said, not even trying to contain his grin, since he knew he'd never be able to.

*****

 _The Lion King_ turned out to be an animated movie about, you guessed it, lions. Charles was relieved when Erik had Luna turn it off so they could eat. He was even more relieved after dinner, when Erik suggested they go outside while Luna resumed her movie.

The patio was large and surrounded by mosquito netting on all sides. Erik's back yard, as seen from here, was on the medium side, and contained the swing set Charles had previously noticed, a wading pool, a plastic playhouse, a tricycle, and various smaller toys.

Erik opened the door from the patio to the yard for the dog before sitting down at the table. He had picked up a chess set from a shelf which had mostly included games such as Chutes and Ladders and Sorry, and now he sat it down between them.

This, at least, Charles had expected from today, so he was glad to help set up the game. White for him, black for Erik, as ever. There was little need to talk, at least to start with. They were ten moves in by the time Erik said, "Luna watches that movie every day. Half the time, she watches the sequel too."

"Oh, is there a sequel?" Charles asked idly, paying more attention to the game than the conversation. He could capture Erik's bishop, but then Erik would most likely take his rook...

"Unfortunately," Erik said. He paused for a moment before adding, "I now know more about Disney movies than you can imagine."

"Oh, that's all right," Charles said, still idly, as he changed his mind about Erik's bishop. "I could tell you more about genetics in five minutes than you've absorbed in forty years, so I suspect it all evens out."

Erik laughed, sharp and surprised, which was when Charles remembered that the situation was different this time, that they weren't supposed to be fighting so much as being vaguely awkward with one another.

"Sorry," he said. "Habit."

"It's fine."

Charles couldn't read Erik's expression now. Anger would have been easy, or disdain. Even the softness with which he regarded his granddaughter every time he spoke to her wasn't difficult to make out. Those things were easy because they were simple: one emotion, clearly expressed. Whatever Erik was thinking or feeling now had to be more complicated. Charles was struck by the desire to know exactly what it was, and for the first time in years was tempted to look, just for a moment. Long enough to determine whether or not Erik knew what Charles had known the moment he met Erik's granddaughter: that Luna was human, through and through. Long enough, too, to learn if what he'd begun to suspect about Erik's reasons for asking him here was anywhere close to the truth. It would be the work of no more than a few seconds—

But Charles hadn't spent all these years staying out of Erik's mind to fall back in now. He was stronger than that. After Erik took his rook anyway, Charles said, "So. What's the story here?"

"I've retired," Erik said. "I thought that was obvious."

It had been relatively obvious. There wasn't really any other conclusion Charles could have arrived at based upon Erik's years-long disappearance and what he'd seen today. But it was still a relief to hear it, and to know that Magneto would no longer be in Charles' hair, so to speak. And it was good, too, to see Erik had settled down so thoroughly—that he had a family and a home and pets, all things that had been denied him and that he'd denied himself for most of his life. Intensely irritating, unbelievable in a way that for some reason seemed tantamount to yet another betrayal—Erik couldn't have even dropped a letter in the mail over the past first years?—but good.

"I meant I wanted the details. I think you know that." It wasn't like Erik to dodge like this, but then usually what Erik was explaining was why he'd seen it necessary to go off half-cocked yet again, and why Charles was a naive fool for thinking that anything other than the subjucation of humanity would get mutantkind anywhere. Clearly, the more domestic and personal the subject, the more uncomfortable he seemed to find it.

After a minute or two spent gazing out at the yard, Erik turned his attention to the chess board, and continued: "When Luna was born, Pietro seemed to think my presence in her life would endanger her. He thought I had too many enemies, as Magneto." Well, it wasn't as if Pietro had been wrong. Later, Charles would never quite be sure how he managed not to point this out in the long, silent moment before Erik said, "He gave me an ultimatum. I took it."

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall for that conversation. Charles couldn't imagine it, even though he'd witnessed lesser conflicts between the two of them. Even more, he couldn't imagine Erik backing down, although it was clear that that was exactly what had happened. Charles never would have believed it for a moment if Erik hadn't admitted to it himself. Hell, if Erik had tried to tell him as much over the phone, Charles still wouldn't have believed it, not without seeing Erik with his granddaughter in this house.

When it became clear that Erik did not intend to elaborate, Charles said, "Ah. That makes sense, I suppose." But there was something else that didn't. "So, why is your entire house wheelchair accessible?"

A ramp in front of the house was one thing, but multi-level kitchen counters, with the lower level right at Charles' level, was something else altogether. Before they'd eaten, Charles had peeked into the bathroom to find that grab bars had been installed for the toilet and the bathtub. This was an older house, but every doorway Charles had seen had been easily wide enough for him to fit through. It was extremely suspicious. Charles didn't believe for a moment that Erik had made all these renovations in advance of the possibility that he would one day be using a walker. Erik had never thought that far ahead, and anyway, the other Erik seemed to have been getting around just fine under his own power in 2025.

For his part, Erik had never looked so much like a deer in the headlights. When he recovered a few seconds later, he said, "Can't you just—" and gestured toward his temple.

"No, I can't 'just,'" Charles said. He hadn't 'just' without a damned good reason in nearly forty years; he wasn't about to fall off the wagon just because Erik was so emotionally lazy he'd prefer to give Charles access to his unfiltered thoughts over expressing himself in words. (No, not even if Charles had been tempted to do so just a few minutes ago.) Anyway, Charles wanted to hear what Erik had to say.

Erik must not have had much to say about it, because instead of answering the question, or even huffing and puffing about how unreasonable Charles was once again being about not reading his mind on demand, he got up out of his chair, rounded the table, leaned down and kissed Charles for the first time in thirty years. And, though Charles had spent the last thirty years determined never to do this again, he couldn't help but kiss Erik back.

Charles knew he shouldn't be letting this happen. He had a chip on his shoulder the size of Manhattan because he needed it. He only agreed to meetings with Erik in public venues for a reason. He'd known since 1973 that he needed to keep his distance from Erik, that otherwise he'd end up falling into bed with Erik again and again, with no way to know whether or not it would ever turn out all right. Yes, he and Erik had ended up together in that other life, but only after many years and the end of the world—and since Charles' entire goal over the past thirty years had been to prevent the very circumstance which had brought them together in that other life, he'd decided not to do that to himself. The other Charles had seemed at peace with that much, but then hadn't he had to be?

Charles hadn't wanted to spend forty-odd years making all the same mistakes in his love life in the hopes that he and Erik would still end up together without the help of the apocalypse, and so he'd held himself apart. And now, he knew he should push Erik away. He should go back to the park and find his rental van (assuming it hadn't been towed by now). He should check into the hotel room he'd reserved, and tomorrow he should get on the flight back. He'd found out what Erik was up to, after all. He'd ascertained that Magneto would no longer be a stumbling block to his work. That should have been all he needed. It should have been enough.

But instead of pushing Erik off, Charles let the kiss go on. Erik's mouth was warm against Charles' own, and so much gentler than it had been in Paris, when they'd each had ten years' worth of anger and resentment to take out on the other. His beard, too, was softer than it looked, not the irritant Charles would have assumed if he'd for one moment let himself fantasize kissing Erik while Erik so strongly resembled a hobo.

They'd been kissing for some minutes when the patio door flew open and they broke apart.

"Poppa," Luna said, apparently not having noticed them kissing, or how flushed and breathless the both of them were, "will you play Uno with me?"

"—Yes. Go get the deck of cards," Erik said. When Luna had disappeared back inside, he said, "We'll talk about this later."

'No, we will not,' was what Charles should have said. 'It was lovely catching up, but I really must be going,' followed by a hasty retreat through Erik's conveniently navigate-able house. Instead, all he managed to say was, "All right."

*****

Luna's bedtime was eight pm. Erik was surprisingly firm on bedtimes for a man who had otherwise agreed to everything his granddaughter had asked him about in Charles' presence, for there was no wheedling to stay up just a little later, and no stalling, and Luna was sound asleep by eight-thirty.

By ten-thirty, Charles was naked with Erik in Erik's bedroom, with the door locked just in case. Now that things weren't quite so urgent, nor going to get anywhere near as urgent again tonight, Charles could study the changes in Erik's body, as Erik had studied Charles after they'd first undressed. He'd aged well, was as lovely at seventy as he'd been at thirty and forty. He'd gained plenty of wrinkles, and he sagged in places he hadn't the last time, and it was all fascinating to Charles' eyes. His old scars had all faded, too, but to Charles they were the only things about Erik which had.

Charles wasn't the only one who became sentimental after sex, because as soon as Erik caught him staring in the lamplight, he said, "You should come live with me."

"Mmm," Charles said, not terribly surprised. There were, after all, a limited number of reasons Erik would go to all this trouble. "I'll think about it."

He'd thought about it for much of the evening already, but Erik didn't need to know that Charles had already thought about all of the delegating he'd done over the past few years, how little work it would take to hand off the remainder of his daily responsibilities at the school. He couldn't step back from the political side, didn't dare, but he'd seen enough in his counterpart's mind all those years ago to know how much different and how much better the landscape was for their people in this 2003 than it had been in the other. Erik didn't need to know that Charles had already come to the conclusion that the mutant movement didn't need him so much that he couldn't move to Iowa, _if_ he decided he wanted to.

*****

"Can I ask you a question?" Luna asked the next morning. She hadn't had much to say to Charles the day before, but now that he'd shown up at the breakfast table, she seemed to be completely fascinated, and had chatted at him long enough to 'ruin' one bowl of cereal already (apparently she needed to eat it within three minutes or it got too soggy to be borne).

"Go ahead," Charles said.

Luna glance at Erik, and then with the urgency of all small children who are asking something they know they shouldn't, but figure they could probably get away with if they asked if they ask first, said, "Why are you in a wheelchair?"

Erik choked on a mouthful of what had formerly been Luna's Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

"I fell off a ladder," Charles said automatically. It was his habitual response to this question, as it generated far fewer follow-up questions than the truth.

"Did it hurt?"

"Yes," Charles said. "Erik, are you all right?"

Erik's face had gone alarmingly red as he coughed and pounded on his chest. But he managed to nod as he reached for his glass of orange juice and then took a sip. "Fine. I'm fine."

Luna was now watching Erik with wide eyes. "Are you gonna make it, Poppa?" she asked. It had the feel of something which had been said to her quite often. Charles read her, just a little, and saw that indeed it had: Erik has asked her that every time Luna had ever bumped her head, skinned her knee, or pulled the cat's tail and been scratched for her trouble.

"Hopefully," Erik said, dryly.

*****

An hour or two later, Charles was out on the patio again, watching as Erik pushed Luna on the swing, when Pietro appeared. As usual, he had Charles' wallet and made a show of flipping through it as Charles adjusted to the fact that, yes, there was a person here who had probably been five miles away half a second ago.

"Give that back," Charles said, as he always did.

Pietro handed Charles' wallet back. "So he finally convinced you to move up here, huh?"

As Charles made a noncommittal sound, he wondered how many people Erik had told, or how many had correctly guessed.

"You're making a mistake, man. You're making a biiiiiig mistake."

"I think I can decide that for myself." Charles wasn't in the mood to get into it, or correct the assumption that his moving in was a done deal. He and Pietro never had gotten along all that well, especially after all the havoc he'd wreaked at the school for the single year he and Wanda had attended. It hadn't helped that that was also the year Erik had discovered the twins were his. Double havoc, with Charles in the middle.

"Iowa is super boring," Pietro continued. "Do you know how many cornfields I have to go through on my way here?"

"Hi, Daddy!" Luna shouted, waving at Pietro from the swing.

"It's time to go," Pietro called back. A second later, Luna's bag was on the patio table, filled with all her clothes and things.

The swing slowed enough for Luna to slide off, and she and Erik came back over to the patio.

"Thanks for watching her," Pietro said to Erik, which was about ten times as civil as anything Charles would have expected out of him. "Next Friday at three, right?"

"Yes," Erik said.

"Bye, Poppa," Luna said.

Erik leaned down to hug her, and she kissed him on the cheek. "See you next weekend."

"Bye, Charles," Luna said, waving at him. No hug, but that was fine.

Then Pietro swung Luna's bag over his shoulder and took her hand, and they were gone.

"Well," Charles said, at a bit of a loss for what else to say now that he and Erik were so suddenly alone again. He almost wished Pietro had stayed, although he'd also gotten the impression that he'd had roughly three minutes to get Luna home to DC before he was due at work. People with superhuman speed tended to cut things even closer than teleporters, and that was saying something.

Erik sat down across from Charles, looking a little deflated. "Well? Have you made up your mind yet?" He sounded deeply suspicious, as he always did about anyone who took more than two seconds to make major life decisions.

"No, I haven't," Charles said—though if he were honest with himself, he was on his way there. To his great surprise (and not a little annoyance at himself for how quickly he'd done an about-face after thirty years of staying firm), he could see himself settling down into a quiet life here with this not-so-quiet man of extravagant gestures, who for his human granddaughter had upturned his entire life, and who for Charles had so presumptively bought or renovated an entire house without so much as asking first. It was enough to make one wonder how much Logan had told Erik about their alternate future back in 1973, and if he'd been the optimist for once where Charles had been the pessimist.

Erik didn't look pleased, but all he said was, "When will you know?"

"By the middle of June, most likely." Graduation was on June 14th, and he really couldn't jump ship in the middle of the semester. He needed time to put his affairs in order, make sure Ororo, Hank and the rest could get along without him. If he was going to do this, and he seemed to already be doing it, he was going to do it right. "Why don't you give me a call around the fifteenth?"

Then, for the first time in thirty years that didn't involve an immediate emergency, Charles sent out a tendril of telepathy in Erik's direction. It was just enough to pick up on Erik's rather extreme annoyance at the delay, as well as his determination to show up at Charles' house on June fifteenth to demand an answer.

Well, when Erik did show up, Charles could make him help carry boxes down. But, he thought, there was absolutely no need to tell Erik that yet. Charles had waited long enough, even if he'd told himself he wasn't waiting, that he was done. As far as he was concerned, Erik could stand to wait a little longer, too.

**Author's Note:**

>  _Finding Nemo_ was released on May 30, 2003, which I didn't know until I was editing this. For the sake of this story, I'm pretending it was released a month or two earlier, since I picture this story taking place in mid-late April.
> 
> Erik's dachshund in this story was originally going to be a black and tan one, but then I saw [this picture](https://instagram.com/p/1qWx6kLL19/) and just had to change it. :P


End file.
